The Apprenticeship Team are currently celebrating the outcome of their successful Ofsted Monitoring Visit.

As an Employer Provider, the team bring valuable income into the Trust as well as striving to deliver quality apprenticeships to our clinical apprentices. The Monitoring Visit was an inspection to assess how much progress the team are making towards being ready for a full inspection. A grading of insufficient progress in any of the 3 themes inspected means that no new apprentices can be trained, so the stakes were high.

There were three inspectors who, during the two days of the visit in June, held at 48 hours’ notice, spoke with key personnel involved in Apprenticeship provision at CHFT including Pam Wood, Suzanne Dunkley, Lindsay Rudge, Vicky Thersby as well as a number of apprentices and their line managers in order to triangulate their findings.

The Apprenticeship team are made up of Pamela Wood, Jeanette Riley, Michelle Ward, Mark Sutcliffe, Natalie Bailey, Vanessa Dean, Janette Murphy and Lynsey McAuliffe.

Pam said: "The team work hard constantly to support the clinical apprentices and are passionate about what they do; but they went the extra mile to prepare for this visit and welcome the inspectors”.

108 clinical apprentices have been recruited since the team gained employer provider status in July 2017, 51 of whom have now completed. All of these have gone on the secure permanent employment at CHFT or progress to higher education / higher apprenticeships, something which very much impressed the Inspectors. 

Achieving ‘Reasonable Progress’ across all 3 themes is reason to celebrate – it means the team can continue to build on their successes so far and strive to improve apprenticeship delivery further with future cohorts. Our latest cohort (featured in the main image) to start with us after the Ofsted success began on 8th July 2019. The apprenticeship team are excited to take on board the feedback from the visit and implement new delivery methods for this and future cohorts.

At present there are 179 staff at CHFT completing an apprenticeship, of which, 59 are on our clinical apprenticeship programme.